For the second week in a row, the economic crisis only narrowly edged out Somali pirates as the top story in what is becoming a more diverse news landscape than earlier in the year.

With media attention to the financial meltdown falling to less than 50% of its level a month ago, an obvious question emerges: As the news about the economy gets modestly better, and the torrent of grim news slows, is the story attracting less attention than it did when things seemed more dire?

For the week of April 13-19, the financial crisis accounted for 18% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. While that’s a small increase over the previous week (15%), it marks the third in a row when the subject has accounted for less than 20% of the coverage. By contrast, it filled 43% of the newshole in the first two months after Barack Obama’s inauguration.

One effort last week to summarize the state of the economy, a front-page story in the April 15 Washington Post, began with the sentence, “The president and the Federal Reserve chairman voiced cautious optimism yesterday that the economy could be beginning to stabilize.” Perhaps a storyline that ambiguous and tenuous helps explain why the media have diverted their attention to pirates and other events in recent weeks.

Indeed, the economy last week was rivaled by the dramatic story of piracy, hostages and freedom on the high seas. In the days following the April 12 rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, the Somali pirates accounted for 16% of the week’s coverage. And the saga was the top story on both cable news and broadcast network news. The No. 3 story—the war on terror at 7%—was fueled by the disclosure of memos detailing controversial interrogation techniques during the Bush administration.

The No. 4 story (also at 7%) involved the April 15 tea party protests. But it also proved to be something of a journalistic Rorschach test, generating very different levels and kinds of coverage in different media sectors. In some quarters (most notably the Fox News Channel), the protests were largely treated as an outpouring of grassroots dissatisfaction with tax policy and expanding federal government. In others (most notably MSNBC), they were often dismissed as anti-Obama anger fests centrally orchestrated by Republicans looking for an issue.

And so last week, the tea parties became a vehicle for the ideologically driven arguments that had been a significant part of the earlier media narrative about the stimulus package and Obama’s proposed budget. Recently, as those partisan battles over economic policy have subsided and news from the banking sector has brightened a bit, coverage of the meltdown has plunged.Source:Economy Shares Headlines with Pirates, Tea Parties and Waterboarding